Assuming that the reason we have altruism is because as a species, one of our survival strategies is to work together (like ants, bees and wolves), then the brain needs a method of motivation towards the behaviors that optimize long term survival of the species (e.g. food, sex, helping others when appropriate, etc.) This attribute is probably not found in sharks.
The short answer is the benchmarks are all over the internet. For example, look at the OLTP results at WWW.TPC.ORG, you will notice that the top 10 only have Itanium and Power processors. If x86 processors performed the same as Itanium and Power, don't you think you would see systems with x86 at the top of that list?
If you dive into the detailed specs of the various processors you will see their strengths and weaknesses, there is no "one size fits all".
Actually the benchmarks show a different picture. Hardware designed for server computing is not the same as hardware that is designed for commodity use (e.g. home/low cost).
I'll wait until the specs come out Tuesday* before I decide if the Power6 is interesting
The Power6 is interesting in the server processor arena because IBM has been the leader in this market since Power4 and every indication is that the Power6 will continue this. Keep in mind this is not a desktop or laptop processor, this is a processor designed for large business servers.
Not to mention that IBM didn't seem to be putting any resources at all into a low-power verion of the POWER5
The POWER5 was also a business server process, not desktop or laptop. You are thinking of the PowerPC portion of the Power architecture which is what Apple was using.
If you have a box that scales from a few users to multiple thousands, how do you price the software? The tiered pricing is an attempt to make it close to user based on the assumption that the larger machines are serving more users. The alternative would be to have actual user based pricing.
"There's no reason that if this thing were hooked up to a large display that we couldn't watch video in this environment," Mundie said.
The fact that the average person in the developed world spends hours per day viewing video on a TV suggests that TVs are widely considered adequate for that task.
Ok, so I use the TV to watch some TV. What do I need the phone for again?
What about a division? A wholely owned subsidiary? Lots of different reasons to have different tax id's with complex webs of ownership, I don't it is that simple.
How do you think WalMart prices it's products? They are not ALL cheaper than safeway or any other store (I have seen numerous examples but no I can't cite them, I just logged it away as something interesting I noticed).
the only reason people still use the AS/400 or any other IBM mainframe
An AS/400 is a midrange, not a mainframe. Despite having a large span of scalability, the AS/400 only overlaps the bottom end of the mainframe in performance.
Also, the reasons people buy AS/400's and mainframes are as follows:
Extremely high reliability and security
Performance and scalability
Protection of software investment
justify scrapping for something modern
Do you realize that the AS400 hardware and operating system is more "modern" than Unix? Did you realize that the as400 hardware and operating system have key features that other OS's lack today but most people are moving that direction? Do some research on security and the as400, for example.
the AS/400 or iSeries as it's been renamed, could be replaced in a heartbeat by a LAMP server with an AJAX frontend for 1% of the cost.
Have you ever seen an AS/400 that required even an operator? High end, sure, but small to medium business the controller puts in the backup tape and that's about it. Hardware/software, you're right, but unless you include support salaries then you are comparing apples to oranges, although you could make the exact same argument about Sun/Oracle being more expensive than LAMP.
Power5, Power5+, Power6, etc. are very powerful server processors, more powerful than x86. Here are some specs for Power6, due out in a couple months:
From Wikipedia
"The POWER6 will be using approximately 790 million transistors and 341 mm large fabricated on an 65 nm process. It is expected to run faster than 5 GHz when released in mid 2007[2] but the company has noted prototypes have reached 6 GHz.[3] POWER6 reached first silicon in the middle of 2005[4] and finished products will be available in mid 2007.[5]
Dr Frank Soltis, an IBM chief scientist, said IBM had solved power leakage problems associated with high frequency by using a combination of 90nm and 65nm parts in the POWER6 design.[citation needed]
The processor is a dual core design and will have 128 kB of L1 cache (64 kB data + 64 kB instruction), an eight-way, set-associative design with a two-stage pipeline supporting two independent 32-bit reads or one 64-bit write per cycle.[6] Each core will have a 4 MB "semi shared" L2 cache, where the cache is assigned a specific core, but the other has a fast access to it. The two cores share a 32 MB large L3 cache which is off die, using an 80 GB/s bus.[7]
Each core will have two integer units, two binary floating-point units, and a decimal floating-point unit, and is capable of two way SMT. The binary floating-point unit incorporates "many microarchitectures, logic, circuit, latch and integration techniques to achieve [a] 6-cycle, 13-FO4 pipeline," according to a company paper.[6] The POWER6 will have support for decimal arithmetic. 50 new floating point instructions handle the decimal math and conversions between binary and decimal.[7] This is a feature currently present in the processors powering IBM's System z and is a necessity in POWER6 if the eClipz-mission is to succeed.[8]
There will be an AltiVec unit to POWER6, and the processor will be fully compliant with the new Power ISA v.2.03 specification. POWER6 will also take advantage of ViVA-2, Virtual Vector Architecture, that enables the combination of several POWER6 nodes so act as a single Vector processor."
"You see, most barcodes will be playing at 10. You're on 10, all the way up, all the way up...Where can you go from there? Nowhere. What we do, is if we need that extra push over the cliff...Eleven. One more character."
I've seen this in Japan for years. Ads in magazines and elsewhere have little square bar codes like American UPS packages. Take a picture of them with your cell phone and it pops up some content on your screen.
Japan seems to have a culture where they like these types of things. For me, the last thing I want to do is spend more time with advertisements, etc.
Please take this the right way when I say go do some research and understand the topic. The clone is not exactly the same, not by a wide margin. The scientists are hard at work trying to figure out why not.
Animal cloning involves remove genetic material from 1 cell and discarding, removing genetic material from another cell and inserting into first cell. In addition, using various methods, gene expression is altered to trick the genetic material into thinking it is at this initial stage of development when i reality it came from a mature cell. This altering of gene expression is critical because otherwise it will not produce the correct chemicals for development, it thinks it's already done that once (which it had). They are learning this process by trial and error.
This is far more complex than what has been going on for centuries in plants.
As a molecular biologist and MD you should know that the expression of genes has been altered in the process to trick the cell into properly producing the chemicals required at each stage of development. And you should know that they are learning this by trial and error.
You should also know that, even if the dna was the same, chemicals present during development and molecules that attach to the dna have a huge impact on the resulting organism.
All the abnormalities and birth defects occur with normally grown animals as well,
I responded to one of your other posts, but this statement is ridiculous. Please read up on current research, cloning methods and the issues they are running into.
There is no reason to single out cloned meat for testing except that the idea freaks you out.
Almost everything we eat we have a pretty good history regarding it's safety. Cloned animals undergo a significantly altered process than non-cloned animals, this includes dna manipulation, apllying electric shocks to cell, etc. We do not have a clear understanding of why cloning results in so many failures and why they fail in the way they do. This is ample reason to be careful about ingesting that food until we know more.
Like most issues, this is something best left out of the law books.
This is precisely the situation where the govt should be involved. Does the average person have the resources to perform their own testing? Of course not. Should we trust a company trying to make a profit? Of course not.
The best solution in almost every case is to get rid of the existing laws, not to add new ones.
Radium based paint (glow in the dark, and deadly)
Lead based paint
PCB's
Asbestos
etc. etc. etc.
If something is found to be a problem, then a law is appropriate. If we still don't know (FDA testing, despite being a few years was pretty limited considering the nature of the changes being made to the dna,etc.), then it's appropriate to be cautious.
The clone is not arrived at by the same means as the original. Various genes in the inserted dna need to get switched on/off to trick the cell into thinking it's brand new because those genes regulate production of key chemicals in the early stages of growth. They are figuring this stuff out by trial and error. It's entirely possible this can have unintended effects (not to mention the electric shock to trick the cell into thinking it's been fertilized).
It doesn't matter which operating system you use - they all contains buffer overflows.
I've worked on at least one system with hardware/firmware/OS protection against buffer overflow and other memory access issues. I'm certain there are others.
The brain is an incredibly complex system that has been evolved and refined over millions of years. Just because progress is slow is no reason to think that progress is not being made.
Unfortunately, the Tandy CoCo that I had at the time was too limited to run a real OS, although there were people running OS/9 on it.
I used OS/9 on the CoCo when I was developing games, it had some advantages over the standard environment. It's been a long time since I've heard it mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM has been doing this in their operating systems for as long as I have used them (late 70's), and probably longer.
Assuming that the reason we have altruism is because as a species, one of our survival strategies is to work together (like ants, bees and wolves), then the brain needs a method of motivation towards the behaviors that optimize long term survival of the species (e.g. food, sex, helping others when appropriate, etc.) This attribute is probably not found in sharks.
So, your logic is, well, logical.
The short answer is the benchmarks are all over the internet. For example, look at the OLTP results at WWW.TPC.ORG, you will notice that the top 10 only have Itanium and Power processors. If x86 processors performed the same as Itanium and Power, don't you think you would see systems with x86 at the top of that list?
If you dive into the detailed specs of the various processors you will see their strengths and weaknesses, there is no "one size fits all".
Actually the benchmarks show a different picture. Hardware designed for server computing is not the same as hardware that is designed for commodity use (e.g. home/low cost).
I'll wait until the specs come out Tuesday* before I decide if the Power6 is interesting
The Power6 is interesting in the server processor arena because IBM has been the leader in this market since Power4 and every indication is that the Power6 will continue this. Keep in mind this is not a desktop or laptop processor, this is a processor designed for large business servers.
Not to mention that IBM didn't seem to be putting any resources at all into a low-power verion of the POWER5
The POWER5 was also a business server process, not desktop or laptop. You are thinking of the PowerPC portion of the Power architecture which is what Apple was using.
If you have a box that scales from a few users to multiple thousands, how do you price the software? The tiered pricing is an attempt to make it close to user based on the assumption that the larger machines are serving more users. The alternative would be to have actual user based pricing.
"There's no reason that if this thing were hooked up to a large display that we couldn't watch video in this environment," Mundie said.
The fact that the average person in the developed world spends hours per day viewing video on a TV suggests that TVs are widely considered adequate for that task.
Ok, so I use the TV to watch some TV. What do I need the phone for again?
What about a division? A wholely owned subsidiary? Lots of different reasons to have different tax id's with complex webs of ownership, I don't it is that simple.
How do you think WalMart prices it's products? They are not ALL cheaper than safeway or any other store (I have seen numerous examples but no I can't cite them, I just logged it away as something interesting I noticed).
the only reason people still use the AS/400 or any other IBM mainframe
An AS/400 is a midrange, not a mainframe. Despite having a large span of scalability, the AS/400 only overlaps the bottom end of the mainframe in performance.
Also, the reasons people buy AS/400's and mainframes are as follows:
Extremely high reliability and security
Performance and scalability
Protection of software investment
justify scrapping for something modern
Do you realize that the AS400 hardware and operating system is more "modern" than Unix? Did you realize that the as400 hardware and operating system have key features that other OS's lack today but most people are moving that direction? Do some research on security and the as400, for example.
the AS/400 or iSeries as it's been renamed, could be replaced in a heartbeat by a LAMP server with an AJAX frontend for 1% of the cost.
Have you ever seen an AS/400 that required even an operator? High end, sure, but small to medium business the controller puts in the backup tape and that's about it. Hardware/software, you're right, but unless you include support salaries then you are comparing apples to oranges, although you could make the exact same argument about Sun/Oracle being more expensive than LAMP.
Still only 256KB (not MB) per Cell CPU, though
256k is for an SPE. The Cell CPU itself is currently configured for 256mb.
Cell already appears in devices from IBM and from Mercury for medical, defense, etc.
Power5, Power5+, Power6, etc. are very powerful server processors, more powerful than x86. Here are some specs for Power6, due out in a couple months:
From Wikipedia
"The POWER6 will be using approximately 790 million transistors and 341 mm large fabricated on an 65 nm process. It is expected to run faster than 5 GHz when released in mid 2007[2] but the company has noted prototypes have reached 6 GHz.[3] POWER6 reached first silicon in the middle of 2005[4] and finished products will be available in mid 2007.[5] Dr Frank Soltis, an IBM chief scientist, said IBM had solved power leakage problems associated with high frequency by using a combination of 90nm and 65nm parts in the POWER6 design.[citation needed] The processor is a dual core design and will have 128 kB of L1 cache (64 kB data + 64 kB instruction), an eight-way, set-associative design with a two-stage pipeline supporting two independent 32-bit reads or one 64-bit write per cycle.[6] Each core will have a 4 MB "semi shared" L2 cache, where the cache is assigned a specific core, but the other has a fast access to it. The two cores share a 32 MB large L3 cache which is off die, using an 80 GB/s bus.[7] Each core will have two integer units, two binary floating-point units, and a decimal floating-point unit, and is capable of two way SMT. The binary floating-point unit incorporates "many microarchitectures, logic, circuit, latch and integration techniques to achieve [a] 6-cycle, 13-FO4 pipeline," according to a company paper.[6] The POWER6 will have support for decimal arithmetic. 50 new floating point instructions handle the decimal math and conversions between binary and decimal.[7] This is a feature currently present in the processors powering IBM's System z and is a necessity in POWER6 if the eClipz-mission is to succeed.[8] There will be an AltiVec unit to POWER6, and the processor will be fully compliant with the new Power ISA v.2.03 specification. POWER6 will also take advantage of ViVA-2, Virtual Vector Architecture, that enables the combination of several POWER6 nodes so act as a single Vector processor."
"You see, most barcodes will be playing at 10. You're on 10, all the way up, all the way up...Where can you go from there? Nowhere. What we do, is if we need that extra push over the cliff...Eleven. One more character."
I've seen this in Japan for years. Ads in magazines and elsewhere have little square bar codes like American UPS packages. Take a picture of them with your cell phone and it pops up some content on your screen.
Japan seems to have a culture where they like these types of things. For me, the last thing I want to do is spend more time with advertisements, etc.
will at least produce the exact same natural cows.
Google is your friend, read up, they are not the same.
Please take this the right way when I say go do some research and understand the topic. The clone is not exactly the same, not by a wide margin. The scientists are hard at work trying to figure out why not.
Animal cloning involves remove genetic material from 1 cell and discarding, removing genetic material from another cell and inserting into first cell. In addition, using various methods, gene expression is altered to trick the genetic material into thinking it is at this initial stage of development when i reality it came from a mature cell. This altering of gene expression is critical because otherwise it will not produce the correct chemicals for development, it thinks it's already done that once (which it had). They are learning this process by trial and error.
This is far more complex than what has been going on for centuries in plants.
As a molecular biologist and MD you should know that the expression of genes has been altered in the process to trick the cell into properly producing the chemicals required at each stage of development. And you should know that they are learning this by trial and error.
You should also know that, even if the dna was the same, chemicals present during development and molecules that attach to the dna have a huge impact on the resulting organism.
All the abnormalities and birth defects occur with normally grown animals as well,
I responded to one of your other posts, but this statement is ridiculous. Please read up on current research, cloning methods and the issues they are running into.
There is no reason to single out cloned meat for testing except that the idea freaks you out.
Almost everything we eat we have a pretty good history regarding it's safety. Cloned animals undergo a significantly altered process than non-cloned animals, this includes dna manipulation, apllying electric shocks to cell, etc. We do not have a clear understanding of why cloning results in so many failures and why they fail in the way they do. This is ample reason to be careful about ingesting that food until we know more.
Like most issues, this is something best left out of the law books.
This is precisely the situation where the govt should be involved. Does the average person have the resources to perform their own testing? Of course not. Should we trust a company trying to make a profit? Of course not.
The best solution in almost every case is to get rid of the existing laws, not to add new ones.
Radium based paint (glow in the dark, and deadly)
Lead based paint
PCB's
Asbestos
etc. etc. etc.
If something is found to be a problem, then a law is appropriate. If we still don't know (FDA testing, despite being a few years was pretty limited considering the nature of the changes being made to the dna,etc.), then it's appropriate to be cautious.
The clone is not arrived at by the same means as the original. Various genes in the inserted dna need to get switched on/off to trick the cell into thinking it's brand new because those genes regulate production of key chemicals in the early stages of growth. They are figuring this stuff out by trial and error. It's entirely possible this can have unintended effects (not to mention the electric shock to trick the cell into thinking it's been fertilized).
It doesn't matter which operating system you use - they all contains buffer overflows.
I've worked on at least one system with hardware/firmware/OS protection against buffer overflow and other memory access issues. I'm certain there are others.
The brain is an incredibly complex system that has been evolved and refined over millions of years. Just because progress is slow is no reason to think that progress is not being made.
Unfortunately, the Tandy CoCo that I had at the time was too limited to run a real OS, although there were people running OS/9 on it.
I used OS/9 on the CoCo when I was developing games, it had some advantages over the standard environment. It's been a long time since I've heard it mentioned.